When racism actually hurts

We don't talk about this enough

As a little brown girl growing up in a nearly all-white environment (in my family, in my school system, in my neighborhood and friend groups, and of course in the Upper Midwest) I’m no stranger to racist language.

Because I grew up biracial in a white family, I grew up in their image— I had no reason to believe that I didn’t look just like they did, and actually had no idea that I was different until my mom sat me down and told me. I must have been five or six years old, and hadn’t spent that much time in the mirror by then. A little chocolate-skinned Black girl (darker than me) moved into my neighborhood, and all of the white kids in the apartment complex we were living in were running around calling her “nigger.”

I chimed in.

My mom, in one of her finest moments as a parent, pulled me inside, lay down with me in my bed, and pulled our forearms close to each other, pointing out the difference in skin tone.

“You see how it’s different?” She asked.

I did.

“That word is a very bad word for a person who has the same skin tone as that little girl, your dad, and you. You can’t ever say that word.”

I heard her. She was gentle and loving. It was a serious moment filled with gravity, but I look back on it with extreme fondness and gratitude.

She sent me back out to play with that little girl. I’m sorry I don’t remember her name— she and her mom didn’t stay in the neighborhood for long, and I now don’t have to wonder why— but we were fast and easy friends while she was there.

I never used that word again, and I went forward into my life armed with the gravity, (and the baggage) of its vile power.

But I certainly heard it plenty.

I heard it mostly while I was in earshot of other people talking, and not directed specifically at me, the way that little girl had to endure. But I once got into a fist fight with a kid on the school bus because I heard him say that word in the seat behind me. I got suspended from school for trying to beat his ass.

I heard it at a party when I was with my biracial Mexican boyfriend as a teenager. I set down my drink and walked inside so I wouldn’t have to hear that word. Later, a guy, a grown-ass man, approached me and apologized that he used it. Someone must have pointed out that there was one of “us” amongst one of “them” and he was embarrassed— not for being a racist, but because he got caught being a racist.

This moment in time, in the time of Trump, people are becoming less and less embarrassed about being racist by the day. I’ve toggled back and forth on wondering if people in America are actually this racist, or if Trump has inspired people to become racist. Even as I write this, I have to assume that it’s probably actually the former. I don’t think people become racist overnight, and the unfortunate fact is that Trump has simply emboldened people to say what’s really in their hearts.

The “we’re better than this” conception that emerged during Trump’s election as president has never been true, and all you have to do is have the briefest understanding of American history to know that.

And now that we’re wallowing in the filth of Puerto Ricans being likened to “garbage,” and the tired tropes of Black people and watermelon (enslaved Africans brought watermelon seeds to America— you’re welcome) those old, sad, scared, hurt feelings of my childhood are floating to the surface.

It’s easy to become enraged when you hear something racist— anger, disgust, outrage, and even revenge are some of the reactions that get the most play when we are in collective moments like this one. It’s me jumping on that white kid on the bus.

But there’s also the me who sets down her drink and walks inside the house to avoid hearing something hurtful. To avoid feeling ashamed at— what? At being in the skin I’m in?

Only right now, there’s no place to set my drink, there’s no house to walk into and hide. There’s nowhere to go.

I wonder if racists and people who spew racist language understand that they are actually hurting people. And if they do, why? Why would someone want to do something to actively hurt another person that they don’t even know?

Logically, I understand that this is simply the water of America. It’s is why my organization, BIPOC Foodways Alliance, seeks to dismantle white supremacy. Myself and my colleagues know what a poison white supremacy— “the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups”— truly is.

This belief is what the United States is quite literally “founded” on, and it rarely stops to admit its harms out loud. Instead, it doubles down, and that’s precisely how we got to here— to “floating island of garbage.”

There’s a James Baldwin quote that I move through life with, and it helps me through times like these:

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”

Hurt people hurt people. It’s impossible to inflict pain without experiencing, without living with, some sort of enormous pain oneself. The stain of mass agony inflicted on people of color by this country is so colossal, it is not likely to ever be staunched. And it is bleeding out mightily in this very moment.

I have no tidy way to end this writing, except to say that hurtful words hurt. I understood this at six years old, and I understand it now.

I felt it then.

I feel it now.